this was done in the suburbs of london in the late 1940s to stop Rickets, a disease caused by lack of vitamin D; the only sure way of being able to get enough vitamin D is by getting enough sunlight. lots of children got it because they didn’t get enough. because women spent so long indoors doing housework, their babies and children suffered. this was a government funded exercise!

Its incredible that these would have been popular. Look how precarious it looks. I imagine no children actually died from these but would you really want to put your child in ramshackle little box stories high up in the air, with a floor made of planks of wood a couple of inches thick and some ****** chicken wire bars? As a grown man, I would be terrified to be in one of those if they made one that I could fit in.

Actually, things like this are still very common!, most people would have a “cage”like this in the backyard,when the baby is sleeping lay it in there, its great for them !
and when you live upstairs,.. this would be awesome to let your baby sleep in (not keep it in there for ever lol)
most modern daycare centers have them too
Fresh air is great,and yes indeed its a thing mostly spread in the 20’s (thats when it became a commercial thing,it already happened before that)

This was actually a commercial product. Like a previous poster said, fresh air was promoted in the early part of the 20th centrury and a few companies sold these “play pens” to people living in the city and couldn’t get to a park to get some fresh air. It’s screwed into the window frame, btw. I remember seeing this exact photo in one of my classes in college.

This was a common practice in the early 20th century, which explains why the picture looks so dated. People used to think that it was healthy for babies to get as much air flow as possible, so they often constructed things like that near windows to put their babies in. Obviously the trend didn’t catch on to today’s society.